Last Tuesday a 25-year-old white student was wandering around Union Square in New York when she was set upon by four black teenage girls who pushed her, pulled out her earphones, and spat in her face. She was wearing a T-shirt proclaiming "Obama is my slave" that she had bought from Apollo Braun's Lower East Side store in Manhattan.

The iPhone has a new application–a GPS navigational system called Loopt. If you’re out and about and you want to know if your friends are in the neighborhood, your phone can tell them where you are and theirs tells you where they are. You’re in the loop. With technology like this, it’s a wonder anyone has affairs anymore. Total information: constant contact, anytime, all the time. There’s almost literally nowhere left to hide.

On Wednesday evening around 7pm, the Reverend Roger Gayler, vicar of St Marks parish, went to answer a knock on the door. It was the night before the Chadwell Heath byelection for Barking and Dagenham council in Greater London, and Gayler had recently written an open letter to his flock.